Cash-for-Childcare: The Consequences for Caring Mothers

Cash-for-Childcare The Consequences for Caring Mothers

Edited by

Jorma Sipilä Professor of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Tampere, Finland

Katja Repo Senior Lecturer in Social Policy, University of Tampere, Finland

Tapio Rissanen Research Fellow, University of Tampere, Finland

Edward Elgar Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

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© Jorma Sipilä, Katja Repo and Tapio Rissanen 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2010926009

ISBN 978 1 84980 423 3

04

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed and bound by MPG Books Group, UK

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Contents Lists of figures and tables List of contributors 1 2 3

4

5

6

7 8

vi vii

Introduction Jorma Sipilä, Katja Repo and Tapio Rissanen Cash vs. care: a child and family policy issue Sheila B. Kamerman and Shirley Gatenio Gabel Cash-for-childcare: unnecessary traditionalism or a contemporary necessity? Jorma Sipilä, Katja Repo, Tapio Rissanen and Niina Viitasalo Finnish child home care allowance – users’ perspectives and perceptions Katja Repo Cash-for-childcare schemes in Sweden: history, political contradictions and recent developments Anita Nyberg Cash-for-care in Norway: take-up, impacts and consequences for mothers Marit Rønsen and Ragni Hege Kitterød Rationalities of cash-for-childcare: the Nordic case Minna Rantalaiho The paradox of cash-for-childcare: are there ways to solve the dilemma? Katja Repo, Jorma Sipilä, Tapio Rissanen and Niina Viitasalo

Index

1 6

21

46

65

89 109

143

161

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Figures and tables FIGURES 2.1 2.2 4.1

Employment and parental leave rates (%) for mothers with children under age 3 years 2006 Percentage coverage for 0–3-year-olds (includes care and leave) in the European Union Use of the home care allowance since 1990 in Finland

10 11 50

TABLES 2.1 4.1 5.1

5.2 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 8.1

Maternal employment rates by age of youngest child 2007 (%) Children in daycare by age in 2007 in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden (%) Municipalities having introduced or intending to introduce cash-for-childcare in August 2009 by chairperson’s party affiliation Form of care for children 1–3 years of age, number of children and share of children, 2005 Employment activity among mothers with children aged 1–2 years Parameter estimates of labour supply among Norwegian mothers with children 1–2 years old Childcare policy entitlements in Nordic countries in 2009 CFC entitlement features in Finland, Norway and Sweden in 2009 Basic social advantages and disadvantages according to the form of childcare

8 52

73 77 99 102 112 119 152

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Contributors Shirley Gatenio Gabel, PhD, Associate Professor, Fordham University’s Graduate School of Social Service, USA. She is a long-time advocate for children and her primary research area is comparative child and family policies in both industrialized and developing countries, especially for young children. She was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Bulgaria where she researched the effectiveness of social policies to reduce social exclusion of very young Roma children. She is currently a consultant to UNICEF on its Global Child Poverty study. Sheila B. Kamerman, DSW, Compton Foundation Centennial Professor for the Prevention of Child and Youth Problems, Columbia University School of Social Work, USA. Her main research interests are US and comparative child and family policies, social protection and welfare state policies. Her most recent books are Kamerman and Moss (eds) (2009), The Politics of Parental Leave Policies: Children, Parenting, Gender and the Labour Market, Bristol: Policy Press and Kamerman, Phipps and Ben-Arieh (eds) (2009), From Child Welfare to Child Well-Being: An International Perspective on Knowledge in the Service of Policy Making, Dordrecht: Springer. Ragni Hege Kitterød, PhD, Senior Researcher, Research Department, Statistics Norway. Her main research interests focus on labour market participation, gender equality, family policies and non-resident parents. Recent publications include Kitterød and Pettersen (2006), ‘Making up for mothers’ employed working hours? Housework and childcare among Norwegian fathers’, Work, Employment and Society, 20(3) 473–92 and Dommermuth and Kitterød (2009), ‘Fathers’ employment in a fatherfriendly welfare state. Does fatherhood affect men’s working hours?’, Community, Work and Family, 12(4) 417–36. Anita Nyberg, PhD, Affiliated Professor (Em.), Center for Gender Studies, . Her main research interest lies in women’s and men’s work and incomes. Recent publications include Nyberg (2007), ‘Lessons from the Swedish experience’, in Hill, Pocock and Elliott (eds), Kids Count: Early Childhood Education and Care in Australia, Sydney: Sydney University Press and Haataja and Nyberg (2006), ‘Diverging vii

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paths? The dual earner/dual carer model in Finland and Sweden in the 1990s’, in Ellingsæter, Lise and Leira (eds) Politicising Parenthood: Gender Relations in Scandinavian Welfare State Redesign, Bristol: Policy Press. Minna Rantalaiho, MSocSc, Researcher, Nordic Gender Institute (NIKK), Norway. Her main research interests focus on Nordic family policies from different perspectives of gender, parenthood and childhood. Among other publications she is author of Rantalaiho (2009), ‘Kvoter, valgfrihet, flexibilitet’ [Quotas, freedom of choice, flexibility], NIKK Magasin No. 2:2009, Oslo: NIKK. Katja Repo, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy, Department of Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland. Her main research interests include reconciliation of work and family, family policy, social services, cash-for-care schemes, intra-household finances and poverty. Her work includes Repo (2004), ‘Combining work and family in two welfare state contexts: a discourse analytical perspective’, Social Policy & Administration, 38(6), 622–39. Tapio Rissanen, MSocSc, Research Fellow, Department of Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland. He is practiced in working life studies and his main research interests are transitional labour market, family policy and gender equality. Marit Rønsen, MSc, Senior Researcher, Research Department, Statistics Norway. Her main research interests are fertility, labour market participation, family policies, gender equality. Her publications in the present context include Rønsen (2009), ‘Long-term effects of cash for childcare on mothers’ labour supply’, LABOUR, 23(3), 507–33 and Rønsen and Sundström (2002), ‘Family policy and after-birth employment among new mothers – a comparison of Finland, Norway and Sweden’, European Journal of Population, 18(2), 121–52. Jorma Sipilä, PhD, Professor (Em.), Institute for Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland. He has been working with research on social policy and social care. Among his recent publications are Anttonen, Baldock and Sipilä (eds) (2003), The Young, the Old and the State. Social Care Systems in Five Industrial Countries, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar; Kröger and Sipilä (eds) (2005), ‘Overstretched. European families up against the demands of work and care’, Malden: Blackwell; and Anttonen and Sipilä (2007), ‘Care capital, stress and satisfaction’, in Crompton, Lewis and Lyonette (eds) Women, Men, Work and Family in Europe, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Contributors

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Niina Viitasalo, MSocSc, Research Fellow, Department of Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland. Her main research interests include labour market, family policy, ageism and equity.

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1.

Introduction Jorma Sipilä, Katja Repo and Tapio Rissanen

Do you think the state should pay mothers for taking care of their children at home? No doubt many of us disagree on this – we can hardly find a social benefit issue that raises more differences in opinions than paying cash-for-childcare. There is a long tradition of discussing possible means to support mothers of young children (e.g., the debates on mothers’ wages). This issue recently became much more topical when several developed welfare states introduced cash-for-care schemes as new means for subsidizing childcare. A new social benefit has emerged besides maternity and paternal allowances, but the arguments for its introduction have been and continue to be ambiguous. Cash-for-childcare (CFC) schemes are related to the necessities of life; they are inextricably linked to employment, care, subsistence and gender relations. As such, the schemes cannot avoid having a number of complex functions and implications. All this makes CFC an eminently suitable object for social research. It compels us to ask what the fundamental reasons are for the existence of social policy benefits, and how the formulation of social policies influences both the use of benefits and their effects on everyday life, provision of care, employment and other social policies. CFC benefits may be used for different purposes, but in this book we concentrate on those benefits intended to support maternal childcare at home. We ask what these benefits mean for the mothers and what their short- and long-term consequences are for the recipients. Our analysis focuses on the European context in which a mother uses CFC to support children’s care at home instead of putting them into subsidized daycare. Obviously, fathers also use CFC benefits, but this has remained marginal. The big issues around CFC as a principle are distinctly connected to women’s overwhelming use of the benefit. If men were rapidly increasing their use of the benefit we would certainly have changed the focus of our research. A particular feature attracting our attention in the subject is that the discussants seem to be talking at cross-purposes. What is it that they

1

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actually disagree about? Politicians take issue with CFC as a principle, the more so when they are considering whether or not to introduce a scheme. Some researchers, however, eschew such a lively debate, perhaps because they are quite unanimously opposed to the principle. But what does such a consensus mean? Does it indicate that there is a lack of rational arguments for CFC, or is it that the topic only interests a narrow section of researchers? Be that as it may, if there are rational arguments for CFC it is curious that we rarely see them in the media, but see instead a plethora of emotional arguments. Finnish mothers at home, at least, speak passionately in favour of the benefit. In this book our aim is to examine cash-for-childcare in all its diversity: we want to contemplate different schemes and from different angles. We try to present to the reader the kind of phenomenon cash-for-childcare actually is. To achieve this we will consider three options. The first option is that it is a reactionary phenomenon: ●

● ● ● ●

a compensatory benefit that people who neither need nor want to use daycare for their children, such as country people who live far away from daycare centres and affluent families, have achieved by exerting pressure on governments in rich countries; a poor social investment wasting public money without any particular social outcomes; a downright protest against women’s emancipation; a trap that repressed and reactionary women enter voluntarily; a device that women can use to stay out of employment.

But if the first option were the only one and CFC only a sign of less rational social policies, why have CFC schemes become more common, particularly in the Nordic countries with the highest female employment rate and easiest access to daycare? The second option is that there are also rational reasons for CFC: ●

●

●

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Social policy discourses may generally overestimate the value and underestimate the strain of wage work and the double working day in families with small children. The benefit may seem like a lifeline supporting the family against the insecurities of contemporary working life, particularly in a situation in which the husband has sold himself to one employer, and another employer is making hard and fast demands on women, without trying to reconcile work and family. Introducing CFC may also be seen as a sign of a cultural change reflecting the growing value of maternity, care and children.

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Our third option is to look at the whole issue in a less contentious context? Perhaps CFC is: ●

● ● ●

a decent way for women living on the shadow side of the female labour market to make ends meet: a respectable alternative to unemployment benefit; a poverty trap, the alternative being not sufficient subsistence but poverty anyway; parental allowance, making possible a care leave that is somewhat longer than usual; sometimes just money to purchase care in a society that does not subsidize children’s daycare.

We do not present all the arguments for and against CFC here, but the options in general may show the variety of ways used to describe the essence of cash-for-childcare. On the one hand, the schemes have been welcomed as offering families the right and alternatives to arrange care in their own way, to grant informal care the value it deserves and to give governments affordable, flexible and easily administrable ways to organize care. Conversely, these schemes have been criticized for reinforcing gendered division of labour, decreasing the female employment rate and leaving children without the education they need and deserve. When analysing reasons for the diffusion and popularity of CFC schemes and the consequences of these schemes, a particular challenge is posed by the fact that the systems are still young and variable. They are latecomers in the world of social policies. Thus, there are differences in the conditions and consequences of the schemes and it also seems that the most recent systems have avoided some of the problems inherent in older systems. We need international research to know more about the differences in the applications in order to understand the extent to which it is possible to reduce the obvious problems involved in these schemes. Are there realistic options for creating such a CFC scheme so that a majority of researchers would accept it, or will they always decry these schemes?

CONTENT OF THE BOOK In the second chapter Sheila B. Kamerman and Shirley Gatenio Gabel study the relationship between cash benefits (money) and care (services) and how they constitute alternative policy strategies for achieving the same or different goals. Sometimes different policies may be enacted to achieve the same goals and sometimes the same policy may be enacted to

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achieve different goals. Little data is available on the efficacy of either cash or care as a strategy for chosen policy goals. Ultimately, choices regarding cash or care tend to be based on political preferences more than sound empirical evidence; and ironically, choosing either cash or care can achieve the same policy goal. The third chapter is also theoretical. Jorma Sipilä, Katja Repo, Tapio Rissanen and Niina Viitasalo first discuss the conditions for introducing CFC as a principle of social policy, including the moral threshold that cash-for-care policies must exceed. They continue by examining the daily life perspective of parents, especially in relation to the issues of care, work and economy that preoccupy individual parents when they consider accepting cash-for-childcare. Finally, the authors analyse how the principle relates to existing social policy systems and the ideas behind them, for example, universalism, gender equality, public economy and the need to reduce poverty. Both individual and political choices are made in cultural contexts between which family values and normative attitudes vary enormously. Katja Repo considers the meaning of the schemes from the perspective of everyday life in the fourth chapter, examining in particular the users’ work-life choice. Her chapter describes how the recipients of the benefit perceive care at home and the choice it has provided. From the daily life perspective the allowance is commonly assessed in a positive tone. It contributes to solving problems associated with reconciling work and family. It works as a kind of extension to the parental leave, thereby ensuring that families have more time with their children. The benefits, ideologies and practices work together and affect each other. Cash-for-care schemes give a choice of home care and produce a space in which to talk about care in a more familistic tone and familistic behaviour gives more legitimacy for continuing or expanding the schemes. In the fifth chapter Anita Nyberg makes an interesting case for Swedish cash-for-childcare politics. Right-centre governments have introduced a CFC scheme twice, even though the schemes of 1994 and 2008 were quite different. The aim of the chapter is to present the historical background of the schemes in Sweden as well as the political arguments and consequences inherent in them. The emphasis of the chapter is on the latest scheme, political differences in its implementation, the numbers of users in the first phase and the public debate accompanying the reform. In the sixth chapter Marit Rønsen and Ragni Hege Kitterød review existing evidence of the impacts of the Norwegian cash-for-care scheme on mothers’ behaviour, focusing especially on changes in mothers’ labour market participation and working hours. They report that the employment probability of mothers of 1- to 2-year-olds has been significantly reduced,

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5

and if employed, the ‘at-work’ probability has declined even more substantially. The reform has achieved one of its goals: to enable parents to spend more time with their children. On the other hand, the extra parental time is mainly provided by mothers, as fathers’ labour supply has only been very modestly affected. The reform has thus had a negative effect on another stated political goal: greater gender equality. The fact that CFC policies go against the core ideas of a gender egalitarian childcare policy that has been strong in the Nordic countries raises interesting questions for policy analyses. In Chapter 7, Minna Rantalaiho compares CFC policies in Finland, Norway and Sweden, examining both the policy models and the political framing of CFC in the context of the policy-making process. In two empirical sections, she first examines the CFC entitlements asking ‘what is offered, to whom and on which premises’ and second, the political framing of the entitlements: ‘what is CFC needed for’. Rantalaiho finds that the CFC policies have slightly different aims, and the political framing varies from country to country – and also over time. It is no surprise that the outcomes are also very different. The last chapter examines cash-for-childcare as a new social policy mode. What should the policy-makers and the parents making childcare choices think about the contradictory character of CFC: strong positive and negative features at the same time? In this chapter Repo, Rissanen, Sipilä and Viitasalo discuss this paradox, taking into account the comments and ideas developed by the authors in this book. They begin with an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of cash-for-care schemes and then continue to consider how the schemes could be implemented so that their major negative features might be overcome.

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2.

Cash vs. care: a child and family policy issue Sheila B. Kamerman and Shirley Gatenio Gabel

INTRODUCTION This chapter is about the relationship between cash benefits (money) and care (services) and how they constitute alternative policy strategies for achieving the same or different goals. One thesis is that child-conditioned cash benefits, on the one hand, and childcare services, on the other, represent the various ways that individual countries solve the contradictory pressures of labor market and demographic objectives: increased female labor force participation and rising maternal employment; higher fertility rates; reconciling work and family life; gender equity; parental nurturing; and child development. Sometimes, different policies may be enacted to achieve the same goals, such as expanding the supply of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services by subsidizing providers or subsidizing consumers; and sometimes the same policy may be enacted to achieve different goals, such as providing a cash benefit to support a mother at home or providing a cash benefit to permit a mother to purchase out-ofhome childcare and enter the labor force. Most of the literature on cash and care focuses on the elderly and/or disabled and most focuses on cash for care. Here, our focus is on children, especially young children, and on cash as an alternative to care as well as a strategy for providing care. We begin with a discussion of the context in which the cash versus care debate has emerged.

THE CONTEXT Key features of social policy toward families and young children include what are by now widely employed income and service components. With demographic and social changes, in particular, increased female labor force participation, the rising proportion of children living in lone-mother families and the emergence of dual-earner families as the modal family, 6

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growing numbers of countries have been motivated to face the need for societal policies for young children. The initial focus was on providing care for pre-school-aged children from age 3 to compulsory school entry (5 to 6 to 7 years) but increasingly, the focus has broadened to include preparation for primary school as well as the social and emotional development of children of this age. As the debate regarding policy options for this age group was resolved and consensus largely achieved around the provision of both care and education, the focus of the debate changed. Since the 1970s, attention has focused increasingly on very young children, infants and toddlers, namely children under 3 years of age. It is the children of this age, their families and the care policies affecting them that are the focus of this chapter. Exploration of the major policy options targeted at the very young children, under age 3, reveals the centrality of income supplements for families with children (cash and/or tax benefits), paid time off from employment to spend with children and ECEC. Thus, money, time and services now frame the child and family policy agenda (Kamerman and Kahn, 1994). Our focus here, however, is largely on the money and service components. Female labor force participation has continued to increase in most industrialized countries and the demand for out-of-home childcare continues to rise. By 2006, more than half of the European Union (EU) 27 countries (14 plus Norway and Switzerland) have achieved the female labor force participation targets agreed on in Lisbon in 2000 as part of the European Employment Strategy. The target set then was 60 per cent of women in the labor force by 2010 in each Member State. By 2006 more than 57 percent of women in the EU were in the labor force but country rates vary significantly from 74.3 percent in Denmark to 46.3 percent in Italy (Commission of the European Communities, 2008). Table 2.1 shows maternal employment rates by age of youngest child for 2007. Confirming the goal of full employment, the European Council meeting in Barcelona in 2002 agreed that: Member States should remove disincentives to female labour force participation and strive, taking into account the demand for childcare facilities and in line with national patterns of provision, to provide childcare by 2010 to at least 90% of children between 3 years old and the mandatory school age and at least 33% of children under 3 years of age. (Plantenga and Siegel, 2004, p. 5)

These are the so-called Barcelona targets. The Barcelona targets for children from 3 to 6 years have largely been achieved, even if only part-time (less than 30 hours per week) in almost half of the countries. The Barcelona targets include both full- and parttime ECEC but do not specify separate goals for full-time coverage (EU

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Table 2.1

Maternal employment rates by age of youngest child 2007 (%) Age of Youngest Child

Iceland Finland Sweden Slovenia Denmark Netherlands Estonia Cyprus (2,3) France Portugal Latvia Canada Belgium Austria Luxembourg Lithuania Germany United States OECD average Switzerland New Zealand Spain Bulgaria United Kingdom Romania Poland Ireland Greece Czech Republic Slovak Republic Hungary Italy Australia Japan Malta Turkey Source:

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